Aliens and herons

Plastic art in public areas in the 1970s and the1980s in Czechoslovakia

After the period of great experiments in the 1960s, monumental sculpture for the public areas was going through a creative stagnation in the 1970s and the 1980s. Results of the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and social and political changes caused that free experiment will not be tolerable. The period called “Normalization” just started.

On the other hand, there were probably more tenders and social orders then ever before. Huge amount of orders was guaranteed by law, that obliged every state building (overwhelming majority of all building projects) to spend 1% - 4% of its budget on „decoration“. This „4% art“ comprised then esthetical dominant features around forming housing estates, health centers, shopping centers, production enterprises and administrative buildings. This way the state ensured work for educated sculptors in order to gain their loyalty and use them for its own propagation.

Unlike our time with lots of different submitters, whose taste or poor taste artist has to adapt his work to, those orders were unluckily submitted by one and only subject – state controlled by the Party. So only a few tolerated attitudes were formed for the sculptures in the public areas. Individual genres differed only in nuances.

Because of the most artists’ aversion to political subjects neutral figurative motifs from the family, sports or working environment, stylized motifs of fauna and flora and abstract motifs prevailed in the realized projects. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia wanted to present itself through the modern socialistic country and it fully supported realization of those projects, coming out of the ideology oriented on public not private space. It understood subconsciously that after the open-minded 1960s complete return to the socialist realism of the 50´s would point out its dictator character.

After closer examination of the sculptures of the Normalization it’s evident, how some of the artists coped with the pressure of socialist reaction. Like in lots of other fields of culture, more or less willingly artists turned to compromise. On the one hand they wanted to model their sculptures freely; on the other hand they were forced first of all to the comprehensibility by the committee of the Union of Czech visual artists. Figurative sculptures served only as a field for a biometric sculptor game.

This bizarre combination of abstract and realistic art has no analogy in the world. Soviet Union continued the way of Sorela and other European countries of the eastern bloc had their slow pace of development uninterrupted by similar events like in our country. On the contrary western countries have for a long time decorated their public areas with conceptualist, minimalist objects.

It’s worth mentioning that underground colleagues called the prerogative sculptors “Sierralists” after the car Ford Sierra. Sierra was then one of a few western cars available in Tuzex and affordable for these lucky men with their lucrative orders.

During the documentation we’ve noticed several repeated types and in order to simplify we’ve given them working names borrowed from the “folk literature“. “What are you taking picture of? Maybe the Triffid, it was originally a fountain, but it stopped working long ago...”

“She lost the keys” – stone realistic act of a crouching girl. The position results from the shape of the sandstone block, in order to optimize work and to maximize use of the material the sculptor has squeezed the underage naked girls into a cube, so the sculptures don’t happen to give the gloomy pedophilic impression.

“Mammoth’s aitchbone”–abstract sculptures made of concrete or fake stone with convex and concave surfaces with intersections, strongly inspired by accidence of bones, sea driftage and similar products of nature, after then popular English sculptor Henry Moore. The objects look like graves of some prehistoric monsters uncovered by the soil erosion. Abstract sculpture was then easily approved by the authorization committee for example like a children climbing frame.

Englishman Henry Moore was a profound fount of inspiration for Czechoslovakian sculpture. He impressed modern and after modern style hankering artists with his experimental abstract approach. Official art interpreters tolerated him as a socialist with the right background (his father was a Irish coal miner), in the first place they praised his late return to humanism and figuration. Moore’s favorite motif of lying mother with a child was often imitated in our country in the frame of architectonic complexes. But most of our “mooroists” adopted in the Czech way only esthetic aspect of his sculptures and therefore in spite of “the good material and formal base these sculptures lack higher ideological superstructure.”

“Triffids” – surrealistic, vertical, mostly axisymetric fountains, flues etc. made of combined materials. Triffids are in the abstract decorative style Brusel, which is sort of a form of a folk Bauhaus, and they would easily fit into the set of international sci-fi films or into the books of the 1960s. Using our fantasy we can imagine them as a monuments of the Chinese man-eating plants from the apocalyptic novel Day of the Tiffids by John Wyndham, published in our country in 1972.

“Aliens”– ovoid sculptures should have aroused optimistic mood of new life and vitality in then forming housing estates. Motif of an egg as a symbol of fertility has been used since pagan times. Thousands of models – cracking, tangled up and phased in motion, often with hidden inner space – give rather depressive parasitic than conceived impression. For that reason young people of suburbia called them Aliens, these ovoid sculptures markedly remain of extraterrestrial monsters´ cocoons from the American sci-fi film Alien from 1979.

Sculptures of the Alien type are mostly inspired by the work of Constantine Brancusi. Although they never visited territories of the western imperialists, most of the Czechoslovakian sculptors could see his works in his native Bulgaria. The first and the best Czech intimate “aliens” come from Eva Kmetova. They are “Fetus” from 1964, “Seed” from 1966, and famous “Human Egg” from 1968. In 1975 she had a realization in architecture in the atrium of the International Union of Students building in Prague “5 eggs” made of marble and bronze. Among the main breeding grounds of “aliens” for the public areas count the studios of Frabtišek Pacík, Jaroslav Vacek and Milan Vácha.

“Herons”– it´s unbelievable how popular the sculptures of water birds were, artfully combined with little pools, fountains and water reservoirs. Roots of this obsession date back to 1958, when a minimalistic sculpture Bird was created by Vincenc Vingler for the successful Czechoslovakian pavilion on the exhibition in Brussels. Later on this artist used the motif of water bird combined with the fountain for the architecture of different housing estates and inspired many other artists like for example František Packa or Luboš Moravec. Preference for animal motifs and first of all the elegant shapes of water birds in Art Noveau style was obviously caused not only by fascination by animal morphology. It was also a way how to fulfill the condition of social realism in front of the approval committee as well as avoid the human figure, that didn’t allow them to avoid the motifs of its time. It is sad that herons, so common until recently, end up in the precious metals collection centers, also because of the PragueCity Hall’s lack of interest. For their subtle construction they’re very easy to be stolen. Flamingos even stand only on one leg.

Patrimony

Current brutal handling of and disregard for sculptures for public areas from recent times of the Normalization, in spite of their unquestionable quality, has forced our group to systematic documentation and popularization of the sculptures. We hope to change the public attitude to these monuments of culture and to prevent hereby the vandalism. It’s a shame that these sculptures suffer not only from usual vandalism like spraying, destruction or stealing but also from the wrong revitalization by builders, who often remove them instead of maintenance. It’s a bad habit that in order to humanize our panel housing estates architects use rather belabored handrails, ice-cream color facades or imitation of gable roof instead of renovation of fountains and sculptures.

Owners of these sculptures are often unsure and that makes the issue more difficult. It’s mostly municipal property managed by the City Hall, municipality office, City Gallery Prague or private enterprises, which privatized the property including a sculpture. The objects were created and registered only as a part of an architectonic project, that’s why some of them can’t be found in registers at all. Authorities get to know about their existence only when they have to be removed at the request of the citizens – parents because of their emergency conditions.